Book Image

VMware Performance and Capacity Management, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Sunny Dua
Book Image

VMware Performance and Capacity Management, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Sunny Dua

Overview of this book

Performance management and capacity management are the two top-most issues faced by enterprise IT when doing virtualization. Until the first edition of the book, there was no in-depth coverage on the topic to tackle the issues systematically. The second edition expands the first edition, with added information and reorganizing the book into three logical parts. The first part provides the technical foundation of SDDC Management. It explains the difference between a software-defined data center and a classic physical data center, and how it impacts both architecture and operations. From this strategic view, it zooms into the most common challenges—performance management and capacity management. It introduces a new concept called Performance SLA and also a new way of doing capacity management. The next part provides the actual solution that you can implement in your environment. It puts the theories together and provides real-life examples created together with customers. It provides the reasons behind each dashboard, so that you get the understanding on why it is required and what problem it solves. The last part acts as a reference section. It provides a complete reference to vSphere and vRealize Operations counters, explaining their dependencies and providing practical guidance on the values you should expect in a healthy environment.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
VMware Performance and Capacity Management Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Index

Network


From the point of view of performance and capacity management, network has different fundamental characteristics than compute or storage. The key differences are summarized in the following table:

Compute or storage

Network

A relatively high amount of resources available to the VM

A low amount of resources available

Granular resource allocation at the VM level

Coarse allocation

Single-purpose hardware

Multi-purpose hardware

A node

An interconnect

Let's understand these differences in more detail, starting from the first one:

At the end of the day, the net resources available to the VMs is what we care about. What the ESXi and IaaS platform use is considered an overhead.

An ESXi host has a fixed specification (for example, two CPUs, 36 cores, 256 GB of RAM, two 10 GE NICs). This means that we know the upper physical limit. How much of that it available to the VMs? Let's take a look:

  • For compute, the hypervisor consumes a relatively low proportion of resources. Even if you add...